[Coral-List] administrivia - addressing and signing of messages

[Mike Jankulak - NOAA Affiliate]

In the coming days and weeks, Coral-List will be testing some technical
changes relating to email security and authentication. It is my hope that
these changes will be transparent to our subscribers, but please do reach
out to us at <coral-list-owner at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> if you experience any
interruption in list traffic.

If you think you might be losing messages, just compare the messages you
received from the list with our online archives here:

https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/

Go ahead and skip the rest of this message if the technical details do not
interest you. For those of you who are curious, two things to note:

One is that the "From:" line of our individual messages will look different
some of you (depending on your mail provider's policies). Whereas before
you might have seen...

From: Some User <user123 at yahoo.com>

...in the near future you may instead see...

From: Some User via Coral-list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Reply-To: Some User <user123 at yahoo.com>

This is, if you will, a more "honest" representation of where the
Coral-List message is coming from. The original content comes from (in this
fake example) yahoo.com but the message itself was sent from the
coral.aoml.noaa.gov servers, and having that in the From: header makes it
more likely that receiving mailsystems will accept the message.  Note that
this change will not affect subscribers to our "Digests" at all.

The second change, or set of changes, has to do with various protocols for
securing email messages (the alphabet soup includes TLS, SPF, DKIM and
DMARC) that we will shortly adopt. The overall intention of these protocols
is to "sign" a message with a checksum that guanteees that no middleman may
alter its contents between sending and receiving.

In fact if there's a downstream effect of these changes at all, I hope it
will be that fewer Coral-List messages will be flagged as potential spam or
discarded entirely by spam filters.

Anyhow, do please let us know if you experience interruptions in messaging
or if you have any questions about any of this.

Mike J+, coral-list mod team